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Flickr? Not a flicker (of recognition)

I think I mentioned that I’ve been doing some user testing lately for a project I’m working on at the moment.

As part of that research, I included some questions to see whether services like Flickr and Del.icio.us were making any impact on the ‘general public’.

Working in web, and reading/writing blogs, it sometimes seems like *everyone* knows about Del.icio.us and Flickr and I find that perspective can influence the strategies that I am inclined to take with functionality and design for projects. It’s easy to start to think of Flickr, for example, as setting a number of 2.0 type conventions.

Except, it’s not really a convention if only a small group of people are aware of its existence.

And that, based on our research, is the case.

Not one person we interviewed (and, to put this in perspective, we interviewed about 18 people) volunteered either Flickr or Del.icio.us as services that they used online. Once prompted, they confirmed that they had never heard of either of them.

I guess its not really all that surprising. More like a reality check.

I’d be interested to hear of any other research that’s been done re: awareness of ‘2.0’ services in the world outside of the blogosphere.

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How about awareness of the whole concept of Web 2.0? All the marquee 2.0 services (flickr, del.icio.us, etc.) combined probably have a million unique users, tops. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not very much…

Even here in Vancouver, the birthplace of flickr, I still occasionally find that otherwise tech-savvy people have never heard of it. Reality check, indeed…

The only reason any of my friends know about Flickr is because I’ve sent them links to have a look at family photos that aren’t public. Without that they would be completely blank … and as for Delic.io.us?

You need to accept, Leisa, that you are part of a still-comparatively-small group of early adopters. But if you were to ask the same question in twelve months (maybe about some different apps by then!) I think you’ll get a different response.

Yeah that sure is reality check. I frequently drop ‘flickr’ and ‘delicious’ in conversations to reasonably tech savvy peeps and they often don’t know what I mean… particularly with delicious. Then you’ve got to explain the URL!

I guess there are plenty of people who don’t read many blogs yet. Life before blogs was really different for me and seems so long ago, so I guess when everyone catches up with blogging they’ll start to adopt web 2.0… the two seem to go hand in hand.

even amongst people we’d consider to be ‘early adopters’, it’s surprising who does’t know about Delicious and Flickr. So when we think about integrating them into ‘consumer experiences’ …. it’s got to be in this context of the unknown system.

Have you seen the Australian National Library’s integration with Flickr tho’? I’ve been pretty impressed/inspired/using this to prod my clients on…